


Half A Mystery

by hermitknut



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Night Watch, Oneshot, Who Watches the Watchmen?, vetinari has a scarily attentive brain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-21
Packaged: 2018-07-25 20:52:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7547009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hermitknut/pseuds/hermitknut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'And then, afterwards, I took a look at John Keel. It was John Keel. How could there be any question about that? Blood on him of course. There was blood everywhere. His wounds looked somewhat old, I thought. And death, as we know, changes people. Yet I remember wondering: this much? So I put it down as half a mystery..." - Terry Pratchett, Night Watch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half A Mystery

Who watches the watchmen?

Ever since the Glorious Revolution, it’s been Havelock Vetinari. Of course, not _all_ the time. He’s been a very busy young man, after all. More precisely, he was busy undertaking his Grand Sneer at great length and distance from the city, in case the newly-instated Lord Snapcase thought to ask prying questions about his predecessor’s inhumation. But upon his return… he watches the watchmen.

The Day Watch is unchanged – brutish, conniving, lazy, all in one uniformed package. The Night Watch is… diminished. They’re almost half the number they were before the revolution, and all the fire of that day is gone as though it had never existed. A little casual bribery buys him the story of the twenty- _sixth_ of May. By the mid-afternoon he’d been halfway to Lancre on a mail coach, but back in the city Snapcase had had the entire Watch lined up in front of him for inspection. And a warning. With knives in it. Snapcase was never particularly subtle. And then his Lordship had gathered one or two recruits for the rebuilding of his own palace-based brand of Particulars. Four members of the Night Watch had resigned after that meeting, including one Fred Colon - who evidently decided that life in the regiments was currently safer than life in Ankh-Morpork – and a substantial number of those remaining left over the following six months.

Upon the return of young assassin Vetinari to the city, they are almost unrecognisable. Of course, he has changed considerably, too – Überwald, in particular, was _quite_ the education. Even to one as contained as Havelock Vetinari, to come back to the city and see it hardly improved at all despite the events of the twenty-fifth of May is… galling. What a waste of an opportunity. Vetinari has been learning from countries and city states across the continent and is beginning to see just how much potential the city has to really _work_. And yet it barely does, and all because of the terrible straining weight of arrogance and sloth and short-sighted self-interest.

For the first time without his aunt’s instruction, Vetinari begins to intervene. In small ways only, little ripples. Madam Meserole notices. She asks him about it, once, gauging his stake. He responds with what, between the two of them, passes for uncharacteristic frankness, and after a week’s consideration she announces her intention to move to Pseudopolis. Havelock volunteers to tend to her Ankh-Morpork interests in her absence, and she laughs.

Havelock Vetinari, lone representative of the small but significant aristocratic family, cultivates a reputation for politeness, a cold sort of charm (if you could call it that and not a sort of predatory hypnotism), and never, ever, being surprised. He has himself noticed by the right people, he discreetly hires one or two Assassin’s Guild graduates (scholarship boys, all struggling to make ends meet in a world dominated by money and family connections, all grateful for the opportunity), and he gracefully insinuates himself into his aunt’s web of connections, makes them his own.

And all that time, he watches the watchmen.

At twenty-nine, Havelock Vetinari is the youngest Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. After all, a young man was best, yes? He’d be fresher and less likely prone to nervous collapse (a breathlessly euphemistic description of the behaviour of the late Lord Snapcase, but that was aristocrats for you). He’d be polite, and charming, and well-behaved, and think himself lucky. _He’d be easy to keep in line_ , ran the unspoken mantra. And Lord Havelock Vetinari, Patrician, steps into office among many firm offers of advice and support. The city holds its breath. And very carefully, over the course of the next few years, he turns it upside down. And smiles.

He watches the watchmen.

Unlike Lord Winder, he does not underestimate them. In preparation for his largest changes to the city, he has them diminished further – and once the Thieves’ Guild is operating as he had planned, further still. Two dozen left. Then a dozen. Then half a dozen.

He watches who leaves and who stays – unsurprisingly, the bullies leave first, without the entertainment of petty power play to hold them there. Then the family men, mostly. After that, the Night Watch is reduced to mostly old men, too old to think about starting again or changing their ways. Old men, and three a bit younger. Fred Colon, sergeant and flawless example of gormless mundanity; Nobby Nobbs, the only watchman to willingly join the Night Watch in the immediate aftermath of the revolution and talented petty thief; and Sam Vimes, captain by dint of a) being the only one with decent handwriting but mostly b) not being quite as fast as the rest to step smartly backwards when the position opened up, a drunkard and a perpetual loner with no known ambition to his name. Other rulers would have dismissed them, forgotten them. But Vetinari watches. Especially in May. They always get drunk, the three of them. The May after his mother dies, Captain Vimes has to be carried back to his rooms by Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs from where he’d collapsed under the lilac tree. Vetinari wonders if they ever spoke about it, and decides it is unlikely.

He watches, still.

And then the dragon comes, and everything is rather predictable – Wonse, Vetinari reflects later, should never have thought himself unobserved, no one ever should – but Vimes _takes an interest_.

He collects ‘clues’ and asks questions and _expects answers_. And then Wonse locks the two of them in the same cell, and Havelock watches the idealistic lance-constable who he’d thought had been drowned in years of alcohol and disappointment shine out through the cracks in Captain Vimes’ anger. No longer a man who thought it _would_ be better and fell apart when it wasn’t, then; now a man who demands it _should_ be better and sets out to make it so, albeit inefficiently. An improvement. And not one to be ignored. A change of plan, then. Adaptability is a useful trait in a leader, and Vetinari allows for it. He watches. And he sees. But he doesn’t understand, not entirely, grasping the shape of it but not the detail until one dark evening, years later, on the twenty-fifth of May by Small Gods. And then it clicks. He had once remarked to Drumknott that he had invented Sam Vimes, in a way. But that had been arrogance, hadn’t it? Vimes had invented himself, and if either of the two of them had shaped the future of the other, then Vetinari had not been the shaper…

Vetinari recalls John Keel – the persona, and the dead man who might have been had it not been for a thunder storm on the library roof thirty years after his death. He wonders who Keel had really been. He wonders who Sam Vimes remembers.

Who watches the watchmen?

Well. There’s always someone.


End file.
